


die before Methuselah

by girlmarauders, knight_tracer



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Original Trilogy, Star Wars Prequel Trilogy
Genre: Audio Format: M4B, Audio Format: MP3, Audio Format: Streaming, Gen, Podfic, Podfic Length: 20-30 Minutes, Self-Exile, Tatooine
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-17
Updated: 2017-08-17
Packaged: 2018-12-02 14:52:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,793
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11511672
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/girlmarauders/pseuds/girlmarauders, https://archiveofourown.org/users/knight_tracer/pseuds/knight_tracer
Summary: Padme and Obi-Wan in self-imposed exile on Tatooine.





	die before Methuselah

Podfic Length: 23:45  
Download Links: [mp3](http://knight-tracer.parakaproductions.com/Podfic/die%20before%20Methuselah.mp3) | [m4b](http://knight-tracer.parakaproductions.com/Podfic/die%20before%20Methuselah.m4b)

  


Sabé and Ben Kenobi look like so many of the other refugees. Kenobi is a common name, and if Sabé has the high cheekbones and pale skin of the Naboo, it goes unmentioned. Beautiful women have come to Tatooine before, brought by cruel owners or foolish husbands or travelling alone, desperate for a better life. The sun weathers everything, even them. 

&&&

Obi-Wan wrapped an arm around her shoulders as she lay in her medical bed, holding Luke and Leia in her arms. She remembered that moment for the rest of her life, looking down at the last good thing Anakin gave her, and Obi-Wan’s strong arm around her. It was a crossroads, the fulcrum upon which a long lever moved, but the decision had seemed so easy, so clear. The children had a way of focusing the mind. 

“Padme,” he said gently. “Where can we go where he will not follow? Where will he never go?”

There was no suggestion Obi-Wan would not come with them. She could not imagine leaving him, the only man who would ever understand the bitterness of her mistakes. She believed they would be the last people to know Vader's secret. 

She remembered the heat of Tatooine, the sand in her teeth and Anakin’s mother's grave. She felt his anger that it had been some stranger that freed her, and saw the twisted creature he had become in the desert. His step-brother had been kind to her, when Anakin had disappeared to hunt the people who took his mother.

She reached up to pass Leia, already the quieter one, to Obi-Wan, and, with Luke tucked close to her, she battled her aching body to stand. Obi-Wan made a panicked face, and, holding Leia gently, he tucked his free arm under her elbow. She tightened her hold on him, using him to stand. Everything ached, but for them, for her eerily perfect babies, the pain was worth it.

Anakin was dead, and a monster had risen in his place. She supposed she was expected to disappear into her grief, or to fade away, like a tool no longer needed, but she had learned to act, not grieve, in the fateful days of the blockade.

“Tatooine,” she rasped, looking up at Obi-Wan. “We’ll go to Tatooine.”

She took a faltering step forward, Obi-Wan’s arm tucked under hers. Bail would have ideas, and Mothma, who was only young, would have the spirit. Tatooine was isolated, but it would be a fine place to launch the Rebellion from. They would need agents there, and Padme Amidala and Obi-Wan Kenobi needed to disappear. Tatooine was a place to go to be forgotten.

&&&&

At first, she was afraid that something was wrong with her children. They were too perfect, too quiet. On the refugee ship to Tatooine, they rarely cried, nursed easily, and babbled happily to each other. Luke smiled at everything, like a sunflower turning towards the sun, and Leia reached for anything that moved, especially Obi-Wan.

“Twins are like that,” said one of the other refugee mothers to her in the queue for food. “In their own little world.” She looked at Obi-Wan over Padme’s shoulder, hiking her own infant higher on her hip.

“You must be very proud,” she said, with a smile. On Padme’s waist, Obi-Wan’s hand was warm, curving around parts of her that had grown thin. The refugee ship was crowded, packed with others leaving the core, desperate and hoping for a better life. Families nursed packs of children, and hard-faced men kept to themselves in the corners, but there were no clones, only private security, and the dock warden had been easily bribed with Bail’s credits.

Obi-Wan never left her side. They were packed 10 to a quarter, sleeping in the bunks in shifts with families they had never met. The engines were old, too old for such a large ship, and every part of the ship was blisteringly hot. She was glad of the heat, later, when it made Tatooine a relief.

Obi-Wan stayed by her side, as lost as she was. He was, perhaps, more lost, without the Temple or the Council. She had needed to make her own way among those that hated her, her home behind her, when she had gone to the Senate. But they both had been driven by something greater than themselves, by a sense that they were to be counted among the righteous. That was gone now. She had not seen Obi-Wan meditate since before they had fled.

Few of their fellow refugees left the ship with them when it docked on Tatooine. A woman and her nervous daughter disembarked, bound for a far settlement to start a hard life as moisture farmers, and a young man, his face badly scarred, to work in one of the Hutt’s junkyards.

It was strange, how in the great wide galaxy with its millions of complex lives, the fate of them all had narrowed down to this dusty planet, to the slave child Qui-Gon had saved on a whim. Something already told her more fates would be decided here. Luke and Leia had been born to a terrible inheritance, but she would see them through it, if she could. 

&&&

Tatooine was a hard planet to make a life, but Sabé Skywalker was luckier than most refugees. She had two living children, and her freedom, and enough credits saved to rent the run-down bar on the edge of town, which was a better living than moisture farming. Ben Kenobi was a strong pair of arms, and he would work hauling cargo in the Mos Eisley docks in the daytime heat.

There was some gossip, because it is strange for a woman to live with her brother with children so young, but stories about her husband, dead in the war, spread quickly in the small town, and no one bothered them. Skywalker kept a long hunter’s rifle behind the bar, and it only took once to prove that she could use it.

Sometimes, if you needed it, and you knew the right words, Sabé Skywalker had things to sell from her back room. She paid protection to the Hutts, like anyone who wished to live, but sometimes hard-faced strangers would come to the bar, and Kenobi seemed to know them.

Bars were a good place for whispers, and no one thought twice about its warren of back rooms, or the deals made over its tables.

There were not many old people on Tatooine, but some of them remembered that there had been a slave called Skywalker, and she had been beautiful once too. It seemed strange to them, but their memories of her were always slippery, like water running in a desert wadi, and they soon forgot that the beautiful slave had grown older and had a strange, eerie son, who knew the truth of things before he was told, who could see the inside of machines, and who had won the Boonta Classic against every odd. Maybe he had died, they thought, or perhaps gone away. Perhaps Skywalker was a common name, on the planet the slave had come from when she was young. They could not remember.

&&&

 

When the twins were six, Obi-Wan was called to an off-world mission. Bail sent a short, dangerous message that he was needed for the rebellion, something desperate enough it needed the last living Jedi. It crossed her mind to ask him not to go, and Leia cried when they explained he would be gone for weeks, but she said nothing. If she asked, he would not go, and good people would die because he had not been there.

“May the Force be with you,” he whispered, into a hug, before he boarded a smuggler ship, Luke and Leia waving at the tiny ship in the atmosphere long after it disappeared from view. Her children looked like tiny ghosts in their white desert linens, and Leia’s hair wrap whipped in the wind behind their tiny speeder when Padme drove them away.

It was highsummer, when Tatooine’s two suns reached their highest points, and everyone with money went somewhere cool and everyone else tried to bear it. Mos Eisley was a heat trap, and she had taken Obi-Wan’s departure as an excuse to load up their speeder and go to Owen and Beru. Luke complained the whole way, like any boy who was six believed it his right to do.

“Why do we have to go to the farm mama?” he asked, his voice a high whine over the whoosh of the speeder. Leia, too well possessed for a six-year-old, rolled her eyes.

“Leia, don’t roll your eyes at your brother,” Padme said. “Luke, your aunt and uncle like seeing you. You should be grateful. “

Luke pouted. He was a sulky child, prone to rages and tears. She feared his moods, but always steeled herself against letting it show. Only Obi-Wan knew how afraid of her own children she could become.

“But the farm is boring!” He said, crossing his arms. She sighed. Keeping one eye on the dunes, she glanced over at Leia.

“Luke, your sister isn’t complaining.” She said. The days when Luke took orders easily from Leia would be gone soon, as boyhood took him fully on its journey, but Leia could calm his moods, or convince him of a plan faster than anyone.

“But mama,” Leia said calmly. “The farm is boring.”

Force preserve her from her own children ganging up on her. They were only six. How would she manage them when they were older? Of course Anakin would give her twin terrors for a legacy.

“Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru would like to see you both very much.” She said firmly, and then, in a bid to win them over, “Maybe, if you are both very good, Uncle Lars will take you up in the A-wing.”

Luke cheered at that, and Leia had the smile of a child who had gotten what she wanted.

For all their complaints about boredom, Luke and Leia chased each other around the farm in the endless and impenetrable games of twins. They competed to repair farm machinery, and learn the pattern of the beeps and whistles of the farm’s aged R1 unit.

The farm was peaceful, and Padme would sit in the cool underground living room with Owen and Beru, listening to Tatooine’s folk stories or gossip about other farm families.

She would go to Shimi Skywalker’s grave at dusk, and pile stones upon the place where she had been buried. It felt empty to apologise, but she forced herself to with every stone she placed. Her mother had been a politician like her, a former handmaiden to the old queen, and she had raised her to believe in duty, in service, but, most of all, that decisions had consequences. She would have to live with hers.

&&&

The messenger boy, Adek, came running into the bar, sweat pouring down his young face.

“Raiders!” He shouted, panicked. “In the west, Raiders!”

There was a split second of hesitation while the room processed the information, and then the bar erupted into noise and confusion. Those with weapons, and most of their clientele was armed in one way or another, ran towards the door, to defend the town or their own homes. The unarmed, farmers’ wives or prostitutes or the particularly stupid pushed towards the back entrance that let out into Mos Eisley’s confusing wind of back streets.

Padme grabbed her rifle from under the bar, and the spare powerpack she always left with it. She had sent Obi-Wan and Luke to buy water, and the Raiders would go to the tightly concentrated humanity of the market first. She gripped her rifle more tightly. She could not leave the bar. Raiders could split off from the pack, or looters take advantage of the confusion. There was the Rebellion to think of, and the contraband in the back room that agents were counting on.

“Leia,” she snapped, decisively. “Bar the doors. Now.”

She shot over to the front doors and pulled the swinging doors closed, cutting off the sound of shouting outside.

“Close the shutter Leia,” Padme said quickly, locking the money box and slipping the key into her underclothes.

“Ma,” Leia said hesitantly. “What about Luke and Uncle Ben?”

“They'll be fine,” Padme said, fitting the powerpack into the rifle and throwing the strap over her shoulder. “Close the shutter and lock the back door. I'll be on the roof.”

“Yes Ma,” she said. Leia wore her hair in the fashion of the farmer’s daughters, in a long, thick braid wrapped round the crown of her head. If they had been on Naboo, Padme would have taken Leia to her woman’s ceremony by now, parted her hair in the centre and taught her the lessons a mother taught her child. Instead, her daughter wore her hair like a farmer, and was eyed by bounty hunters like a prize.

Padme shook herself and let the rifle hang across her back. The ladder to the roof sat near the back rooms and she ducked into the smaller room, checking for Leia before. She crouched in the corner and felt for the latch in the false wall, yanking it forward. In the dark behind the wall, she navigated the tiny room by memory, leaving the communications deck and barrels hiding engine parts and blasters to grab a small brown bag and tuck it alongside her keys. The false wall slid easily back into place, and she used her hip to push a case of ale over the opening mechanism.

Leia was in the hall when Padme stepped out of it, and, although she raised an eyebrow, she followed her mother up the ladder without asking questions. Luke was her wild child, the boy who raced from place to place and dreamed of the stars. It was Leia who was beginning to understand a life of secrets. Padme saw Anakin in her dark eyes sometimes, in Leia’s inner burning fire that hated injustice and despised a cruel universe for its unkindness, and Padme feared that Anakin’s demons lived on. Obi-Wan had not laughed when she had confided her fears in him, the way she saw Anakin in Leia, but the corners of his eyes had crinkled, which was as close as he came anymore. “I remember a young senator who sounds very similar,” he had said.

On the roof, glaringly hot under the double suns, Padme crawled lying down, under her elbows to pull her forward. The roof of the bar curved in a dome, and the summit gave a small disguised vantage point across the town and over the wide main street. Padme could hear shouting, and Tuskan battle cries, but she ignored the noise to take sight along the barrel of her long rifle. It was an ancient thing, with a pump handle that primed the powerpack, but it had served her well.

A fire had caught in the bakers several streets along, where someone has disturbed the ovens, and she could see figures in silhouette against the flames. A raider waved his gaderffii, and she pulled the trigger, catching him in the neck. His body spun and landed on the flames, but she had already moved on. There were people running from the market, trying to escape the raiders and the wild crossfire, women screaming and babies crying, and Padme shot two of the raiders trying to prey on them. There was the punching sound of a blaster next to her, and another raider, closer to the bar, went down. Leia had taken to a blaster better than her brother had, and although Obi-Wan carried one, he hated to use it. She hoped he had taken Luke and ran. He couldn't hit a freighter at ten paces.

She pumped the rifle handle and fired again, killing another raider. She took aim and shot raiders again and again, she stopped counting until Leia grabbed her shoulder.

“Ma, look!” she said, and pointed. Two dusty figures focused into Obi-Wan and Luke, running between buildings. Obi-Wan had a gaderffii stick, wet at the end with blood, and he was keeping Luke in front of him, their backs to the centre of town.

“Ben!” Padme shouted, and realising it would take too long to explain, rose onto her knees on the roof, sighted along the barrel and fired twice, directly into the raider at Obi-Wan’s back, a straggler looking to pick someone off. It felt like the war again, when Obi-Wan barely glanced behind him at the shot and only kept running.

The fire still raged at the baker’s, and in the distance, she could hear shouts, but it had quieted, enough that she felt safe slithering carefully down the sides of the bar’s low domed roof to the ground.

“Luke!” Padme shouted.

She grabbed him as soon as he was in arm’s reach. At ten, he was too old to be held, but she clung to him all the same, tucking his face into her shoulder and lifting him into her arms. Her body curved to his, like a planet to its sun, and the fear she had not allowed herself to feel blossomed in her chest. She started to shake, and she crouched to pull Leia to her other side, bracketing herself with their whole, living bodies.

“It’s okay ma,” Leia whispered. “Don’t cry. We’re okay.”

After a moment, Obi-Wan touched her hair gently, pulling her from her fears.

“We should move inside,” Obi-Wan said carefully. “There may be more of them.”

She nodded, and pushed herself to standing, still clutching Leia and Luke’s hands. Obi-Wan moved them inside, watching their backs with his raised gaderffii as she unlocked the back door with shaking hands.

Inside, Obi-Wan dropped the gaderffii with a clatter and pulled her into a fierce hug. They had come to Tatooine so the twins could live without fear, but she supposed that had been naive.

&&&

There were few rooms for living in attached to the bar, so Obi-Wan had hung an old and tattered linen across the largest room, and they slept in separate beds. Luke and Leia shared the only other room for sleeping, across the hall. It was only then, in the depth of night and in their quietest whispers, that they would use each other’s true names, as if they were curses to be uttered with care.

“Padme, you cannot hide from it,” he whispered one night, only a shadow on the other side of the linen. “The Force runs through them like a river.”

She shuddered. In his crib, Luke had played with coloured balls of light that danced above his bed, and Leia knew the truth of things even when lied to, but she had been forceful with them about the need for secrecy. Their gifts were to be hidden, even feared. They were not toys. Even Obi-Wan was careful. He rarely used the Force, and his lightsabre had sat unused for thirteen years. Still, mistakes were made. Luke was faster than the other boys, and could fly dangerous hunting runs that only the non-humans could make. Leia could make people do the things she wanted, sometimes even by accident. 

“It will put them in danger,” she whispered. Obi-Wan sighed loudly.

“They are already in danger.” He said. “If they are found, we will all be in danger. Better they can defend themselves.”

Padme had not left Tatooine in many long years. She had grown used to the heat, and the sand, and everything she had left behind on Naboo. But information flowed through them as a node in a wide network. The communications array in the backroom siphoned encrypted information from the hyperspace relays and sent it on wards to contacts around the galaxy. She knew the shape of the Rebellion, the ins and outs of its security. She knew they were losing. Something was needed to turn the tide.

“There was a prophecy.” She whispered, as if the mention of it would bring the creature it named.

The shadow of Obi-Wan changing on the other side of the linen paused. She knew his moods like she knew the path of the twin suns in the sky. Once, she had dreamed of that companionship with Anakin, of a peace they would never have. 

“It said there was one who would bring balance to the Force.” She continued. She heard the soft thump of Obi-Wan sitting.

“Master Qui-Gon believed it was Anakin.” He said, with great sadness. “He was wrong.”

“Maybe it wasn’t Anakin.” She said gently. It has been more years since she has said his name aloud that she could count. “Perhaps someone would follow Anakin, to undo his wrongs. What if the prophecy was true?” She knew he would know her meaning. She had not come to this gods-forsaken part of the galaxy to raise her children solely out of fear. Darth Vader had two children, and they would surely be bound for some destiny.

“The Force is strong with them.” He said, the realisation also dawning on him, and she knew then it would become their mantra. “Padme, you must let me train them.”

Ever since she was a little girl in the youth parliament of Naboo, when she had become a handmaiden to the queen, when she had been crowned, she had known the way of things before they happened. She had never trained it, never tried to push her knowledge in a direction, but that intuition had never led her astray. Now, she felt a great weight. This decision would change the shape of things to come for the galaxy. Again, it’s fate would be decided by a nameless woman on Tatooine.

“No one must ever know.” She said. “Even they cannot know what you are training them for.”

Obi-Wan’s shadow moved, and he pushed the linen aside, revealing him shirtless and in light sleep trousers. She was in her sleep gown, a shapeless white linen dress and her hair hung loose over her shoulders to her waist. She kept it long as her last vanity. On Naboo, it would have been a terrible shame to be seen with it unbound, but it had been thirteen years and longer at Obi-Wan's side. Luke and Leia were as much Obi-Wan’s as they were hers. 

“When will we go to the Rebellion?” Obi-Wan said. He knew to train the twins was to prepare to leave Tatooine eventually. She met his gaze. 

“We will go when we are called for. No earlier.” She said.

“The Force will guide us.” Obi-Wan nodded. 

“I hope so. Or you will be the last Jedi."


End file.
